Chapter 7: Gray Feather

The Iron Crane archive was a long hall of black shelves, and it smelled of dust, camphor and old men's ink.

The Truce's registers were kept there.

Every ten years the Alliance wrote down every party that came to the mountain.

It also wrote down the road each party took home, so that nobody could say afterward they had not been warned.

Woo-jin had suggested the archive over breakfast.

"The departure register," Mu-yeol said. "Of course. Someone had to know our road."

"Someone usually does."

"Then someone read the register."

"Or copied it," Woo-jin said.

Mu-yeol lit a lantern, and they went in.

It was the fourth day of the Truce.

The hall was empty except for a sleepy archivist who waved them through with a yawn.

Rows of shelves ran back into the dark, ten feet high, packed with scrolls tied in blue cord.

The Truce shelf was at the far end.

They were halfway down the central aisle when Mu-yeol put out an arm and stopped Woo-jin.

He did not say anything.

He lifted his chin toward the end of the aisle.

A lantern burned on the floor between two shelves.

A man in grey knelt beside it, turning the pages of a long scroll with careful fingers.

He wore a plain grey coat with no sect badge.

A small grey feather hung at his belt.

Woo-jin's chest went cold.

The man looked up.

For half a breath his face was perfectly blank.

Then he moved.

He dropped the scroll and was off the floor and between the shelves with a speed Woo-jin had only seen in killers.

Mu-yeol said "Left," and Woo-jin went left.

They came out of the stacks onto the long aisle together.

The man was already at the far door.

Woo-jin threw his sash.

It was a trick his master hated, a weighted end on a silk cord.

It wrapped the man's ankle, and he went down hard on the boards.

He rolled up with a knife in his hand.

Woo-jin drew Cold Crane.

The man came at him fast and low.

Woo-jin took the first cut on his blade and felt the second go through his sleeve and along his forearm, bright and thin.

He swore.

Mu-yeol's sword, still in its cloth, came across the man's wrist, and the knife rang off a shelf.

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